Arnold Kling explains that support for markets and business are not the same thing:
Consider the following matrix:
Pro-Business Anti-Business Pro-Market Anti-Market The point is that there really are four separate categories, not just the two pro’s and the two anti’s. On health care reform and bank regulation, I would argue that the Obama Administration is trying to be pro-business and anti-market. The wonks do not trust markets at all, and they think they can do a better job of regulating them. But they are more than willing to keep big business interests happy.
An important point is that well-established businesses do not trust markets either. The last thing that a well-established business wants to see is a free market. What it wants is a regulated market that keeps competitors at bay. The people who benefit from free markets are small entrepreneurs and, above all, consumers.
My sense is that until the 1980s conservatives (as opposed to Republicans) tended to lean toward the pro-market/anti-business side. During the Reagan years, though, the pro-market and pro-business sides created a fusionism that paralleled the alliance of libertarians and conservatives. This went largely unchanged for decades until a rift began to appear during the last Presidential primary (Huckabee leaned pro-market, while Romney skewed pro-business, and McCain seemed not to know the difference) until the financial crisis and the bailouts began.
I suspect we’ll soon see a new realignment with conservatives (again, as opposed to Republicans) moving back to the pro-market and anti-business while the Democrats (as opposed to populist liberals) become more comfortable admitting they are pro-business and anti-market.
October 5th, 2009 | 2:43 pm
Huckabee’s plans for building energy independence showed a boundless optimism in gov’t planning that I would hardly term pro-market. I would consider most of the Republican field in 2008 to be pro-business by the criteria above, though I doubt Huckabee would think of himself that way.
Thompson might have been more pro-market, and Ron Paul is certainly pro-market.
October 5th, 2009 | 3:28 pm
I do think it would help the debate if we were to be clearer that market regulation tends to help big businesses suppress competition. But I think that the distinction between pro-business and anti-business does more to confuse things than to clarify.
One of the things that most often appears to be pro- or anti-business is not a policy at all but a sentiment. Some people are suspicious either of businesses or (more usually) of big businesses and this tends to shape their policy preferences. Others regard large businesses as a net benefit and again this tends to shape their policy preferences. But the American political spectrum does not include a policy position that is explicitly anti-business any more than it includes a position that is anti-environment or anti-health. Republicans may be suspicious of environmentalists but they do not for that want to destroy our environment.
We obviously cannot use the pro- or anti-business sentiment to fill in the four by four grid, since this would not highlight the regulation capture that allows anti-market policies to favor big businesses. Someone who hates wealthy CEO’s could still do much to help them by instituting regulation that kills their competition. But neither can we fill out the grid according to which policies actually favor businesses and which do not, since (a) supporters of every serious policy will claim that good businesses will run smoothly under their proposals and (b) often (though by no means always), the question is not whether some policy will help or hurt business as such but which sorts of businesses it will help and which it will hurt.
((By (b), I don’t mean that some policies can be absolutely and unequivocally neutral with regard to all businesses and potential businesses, but rather that some policies may help or hurt so many businesses that the question of “whether” can overtake the question of “which.”))
October 5th, 2009 | 5:12 pm
It would be news to the idiot newsreaders on CBNC (which Wall Street listens to), as well as to the Republican glitterati in general, that there could any difference at all.
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